Ty, not really an expert on technology, made little headway in trying to imagine the particulars. Someone of a more technical bent might have devoted weeks to debriefing Sonar Taxlaw and extracting every last detail about how they had managed to get along with just the stuff available to them underground. More important for present purposes was to get a general understanding of the Diggers’ culture, and why they behaved as they did.
The requirement for a steel-spined authoritarian culture was obvious. Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable. Had these people been living in, for example, the agricultural paradise of the Nile Delta, they might have been able to get away with some mazy religious dogma as the basis for that system. But instead they had been trapped within a large machine that would kill them all if allowed to go on the fritz, and so they had been obliged to develop a culture in which engineering became their dukh. Their finite supply of tungsten, stockpiled by wise Rufus, had to be stretched and husbanded so that their descendants thousands of years in the future would be able to manufacture lightbulbs to grow plants to make food and air. And so on and so forth in every particular of how these people lived their daily lives. Thirty people — the Ten, the Nineteen, and the One — were, at any given time, Cycs. Another thirty were toiling as their apprentices. Others played specific roles such as breeder mom, glassblower, acupuncturist, filament winder, potato nurturer, pump fixer. Structurally, culturally, it was very like a Bronze Age theocracy, but without any trace of God or the supernatural.
To that point it was not radically different from the subcultures of many First and Second Millennium space habitats, which — at least for a little while — gave Ty the idea that he could get a quick handle on Digger culture. But that fantasy soon evaporated. Those early Spacers had been living in cramped conditions, yes, and they had been just as dependent upon technology as the Diggers in their Hole. So of course there were some common features in the two cultures. But Spacers had always been able to look outside to see what the situation was, and — at least after a couple of thousand years of hunkering down in especially large rocks — to venture forth and do something about it. Even in their most desperate hours they had always expected to reinherit the Earth. The Diggers’ only way of knowing their situation and their fate was to listen to loud noises, tally them on acid-free, 100 percent cotton paper, and, every few years, compare the tally with a similar one made by some ancestor a couple of hundred years previously. For the first four thousand years, hope of a better future must have been seen as sheer folly. Worse than that, as an active betrayal of Digger principles, since people with hopes were apt to become profligate in spending resources and taking risks.
Which all made for a picture of those first four millennia that was as clear as it was bleak. But change would come hard to a society like that one. What was most interesting to Ty was what had begun to go on within that society when they’d punched the spoil adit to the surface and begun to expand their underground domain. Their day-to-day lives would not have changed much, but they’d have had at least the abstract possibility that their civilization might expand, that more people might be able to breed.
All of that had occurred more than a thousand years ago. The Hole had grown to the point where it could support a population of two thousand; then, around 4700 when the atmosphere had become breathable, they’d been able to take it up to ten thousand. All still beneath the surface, however, since there’d been little for them above it.
At some point the Committee — which was what they called their ruling council — must have become aware that vast numbers of humans were living in space and actively prosecuting the TerReForm. They could simply have walked out onto the surface and sent out some kind of an SOS at that point. Instead they had made a positive decision to conceal themselves, to hide their spoil dumps, to shun communication with the Spacers. The central question, then, was why they had made such a choice. Sonar Taxlaw wasn’t much help in explaining it. When Ty or the others asked questions, she offered nonresponsive answers that told of a subterranean culture in which such things were never spoken of.
It was clear, however, that having made that decision, the Committee would have to explain it, justify it, and perpetuate it by painting the Spacers as alien mutants, and furthermore by cultivating a finely developed sense of racial grievance against the cowards who had run away and abandoned them. All of which had been on vivid display during the brief and disastrous conversation between Doc and the Digger contingent.
BETWEEN EINSTEIN’S PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRAIN, GEOGRAPHICAL folklore stored in the Cyc’s encyclopedic mind, and Beled’s digital map, they knew generally where to go at any particular moment. What made it difficult was negotiating obstacles in the terrain and steering clear of large animals. The latter group might, in theory, include Red military patrols, but they had no reason to believe that they were being pursued yet. Why would Red bother? Marching some Blue prisoners back in chains might score them some points with their new Digger friends, but having chased them off into the darkness was nearly as effective. Perhaps more so given the importance to the Diggers of the meme of Spacers as cowards.
Ty considered explaining to the Cyc that if her group of Diggers had turned up on the west side of 166 Thirty making the same preposterous territorial claims, Red, instead of approaching them with music and nuggets of space iron, would simply have vaporized them. But burdening the poor girl with that awareness wasn’t going to help.
They holed up in a pocket of shelter beneath a leaf of rock about the size of a football field that had been driven like a blade into the southern slope of a coastal mountain. There they consumed a day recovering from their exertions and waiting out a snowstorm, while communicating in short bursts with a transmitter on the Denali habitat. Blue military dropped a pod through the storm. Kath awakened long enough to announce that it had landed just down the slope from them. Bard stomped out there, his huge feet acting like snowshoes, and returned a quarter of an hour later dragging it behind him. He then stood for a few minutes contemplating Kath. Her sickness had abated, but she woke up now only to eat, eliminate, or make delphic pronouncements.
The pod contained food, fuel, ammunition, robots, and equipment for snow travel that stood them in good stead during the next day, as they descended out of the mountains toward the southern coast. Much of this happened under cover of the heavy clouds that almost always blanketed this part of the world, and so if anyone was watching them, it had to be directly — by actually following them around — or with flying robots. But now they had flying robots of their own that could alert them to the presence of both. Since those remained quiet, they felt reasonably certain that they were not being tracked, except by large canids who tended to make their presence obvious by howling a lot. Because of them, the next night was a restless one, and led to an early departure and a final day of hiking that rapidly developed into a pell-mell descent out of the Alpine zone and toward the Pacific.
During their lunch break, they spied a trio of single-person gliders — inflatables like the one Kath Two had taken on her Survey mission — dipping and darting along the coast from the general direction of Qayaq. As these carried Blue markings and were transmitting Blue codes, Beled felt comfortable divulging their position. Minutes later the gliders had touched down in an expanse of heather a few hundred meters below them. Their occupants climbed out, eviscerated their cargo holds, and began to deflate their gliders so that they could be rolled up. Most of that work ended up being done by a Teklan, shorter and more lithe than Beled. This left the other two new arrivals free to approach. One of them was a Camite whose gait and posture were more expressive of male than of female characteristics, and so Ty made a mental note to employ male pronouns until and unless the Camite requested otherwise. He wore one of the utilitarian coveralls employed by Survey personnel, with red cross patches on the chest and shoulder, marking him as a medic. The other was a middle-aged Ivyn dressed in civilian clothes marginally more posh than might be expected in the wilderness of Beringia, but suited to the conditions.